Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance

摘要

Lizards, snakes, birds, and other animals have long made themselves invisible to predators by blending into their environment through adaptive coloration. Human beings, by contrast, took some time before they began to conceal themselves from enemy hunters by blending into the environment or mimicking nature by using technology. In fact, it was not until World War I that the term "camouflage" emerged to describe the new method of hiding from enemy aerial surveillance. Hanna Rose Shell's Hide and Seek is a highly academic and sophisticated media studies account of the subject of camouflage using an artistic perspective and historical evidence. Unlike previous books on the subject, it is neither a traditional narrative of the historical evolution of camouflage nor a static artistic representation of camouflage. Rather, it is a study of the visual and material practices of strategic concealment, ones that draws on historical examples-from the time of Darwin's Origin of Species in the nineteenth century to Monty Python in the twentieth.